Data Compression

Data compression is the lowering of the number of bits that need to be saved or transmitted and this process is quite important in the internet hosting field due to the fact that info located on hard disks is generally compressed in order to take less space. There're various algorithms for compressing info and they have different effectiveness depending on the content. Many of them remove only the redundant bits, so no data can be lost, while others erase unneeded bits, which leads to worse quality once your data is uncompressed. The method consumes plenty of processing time, so an internet hosting server should be powerful enough in order to be able to compress and uncompress data instantly. An instance how binary code can be compressed is by "remembering" that there're five consecutive 1s, for example, in contrast to storing all five 1s.

The ZFS file system which operates on our cloud hosting platform uses a compression algorithm identified as LZ4. The aforementioned is significantly faster and better than any other algorithm on the market, particularly for compressing and uncompressing non-binary data i.e. web content. LZ4 even uncompresses data faster than it is read from a hard disk drive, which improves the performance of websites hosted on ZFS-based platforms. Due to the fact that the algorithm compresses data very well and it does that quickly, we are able to generate several backups of all the content kept in the shared hosting accounts on our servers every day. Both your content and its backups will need reduced space and since both ZFS and LZ4 work very fast, the backup generation will not influence the performance of the web servers where your content will be kept.

The semi-dedicated hosting plans that we provide are created on a powerful cloud platform that runs on the ZFS file system. ZFS works with a compression algorithm known as LZ4 that outperforms any other algorithm these days in terms of speed and data compression ratio when it comes to processing website content. This is valid especially when data is uncompressed as LZ4 does that quicker than it would be to read uncompressed data from a hard disk drive and for that reason, websites running on a platform where LZ4 is present will function faster. We're able to take advantage of this feature although it requires quite a great deal of CPU processing time as our platform uses numerous powerful servers working together and we don't make accounts on a single machine like the vast majority of companies do. There is one more advantage of using LZ4 - given that it compresses data really well and does that very quickly, we can also make several daily backups of all accounts without affecting the performance of the servers and keep them for 30 days. In this way, you will always be able to bring back any content that you delete by mistake.